CFAR’s Role in Project Sammaan

CFAR’s role in Project Sammaan is to actively engage in facilitating community interactions in the field for: social mapping of each slum, community engagement and dialogue during design and construction phases, and facility management training for community members to help ensure the endeavour’s sustainability.

Presently, we are working on developing a strategy and implementation action plan for community intervention. A communication framework was developed that identified the specific issues that might affect Project Sammaan at the community level, which included strengthening the capacity of staff on specific inputs needed for individual slums, and developing activity checklists for specific project deliverables. Apart from this, CFAR is supporting Quicksand and J-PAL when required at the community level for the project.

The CFAR team is excited to be working on Project Sammaan for several reasons: it is going to address a long awaited issue on sanitation as a pilot intervention in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack through community and public toilets, it supports communities with a compact service package at a single operational complex, it is a research based work, and it has wider coverage with a PPP (Public-Private Partnership) model of implementation.

What’s unique about Project Sammaan, in relation to other CFAR projects, is that it has a consortium of different expert agencies with specific roles operating concurrently in a single project.  It is also a project of its own kind where the planning and implementation is based on the output of first hand data from action researched by J-PAL, and it marks the first time we are working with different partners in a single project specifically on the issues of urban poor.